Prince William Supervisors Approve Massive Data Center Project (dcist.com)
Margaret Barthel
Tyrone Turner
After their public statement in support of the Digital Gateway, Beverly Davis, middle, is congratulated by others. His daughter, Beverly Parsons, is shown at left.
The Prince William Board of County Supervisors approved proposals to build a massive and controversial new data center complex next to Manassas Battlefield National Park. The 4-3 vote was carried by the board’s Democratic majority, after a marathon 27-hour meeting which boiled over into squabbles over procedure among the supervisors and angry and emotional testimony from members of the public.
The vote comes after hours of split public comment on the plan, and despite recommendations from the county’s planning office and the Planning Commission to deny the project.
The Digital Gateway, at more than 23 million square feet of data center space, will put Prince William County roughly even with Loudoun County — home to the largest data center cluster in the world — in terms of the huge complexes, which warehouse the servers required for the internet, cloud storage, artificial intelligence, and more.
Data center companies QTS Realty Trust and Compass Datacenters are the applicants planning to build the complex, which site plans suggest will put more than two dozen large buildings along Pageland Lane, an area which was designated in the county’s comprehensive plan as agricultural and rural land — with just one house per ten acres — until last November.
Sup. Kenny Boddye appeared ready to break with his party, causing the project to fail in a tie vote. He cited concerns about the southernmost part of the Digital Gateway area, which is closest to Manassas Battlefield and Conway-Robinson State Forest. But after QTS agreed to his eleventh-hour request to lower the density of one part of the southern section, he abstained from the vote instead.
In comments before the vote, Board Chair Ann Wheeler criticized opponents of the Digital Gateway, accusing them of spreading misinformation, refusing to come to the table to consider the idea in good faith, and engaging in character assassination of members of the board. She said the economic benefits to the county in corporate investment, job creation and tax revenue were enormous.
“$40 billion in investment in this county … would be transformational,” she said. “Most places would kill for investment like that.”
Supervisor Victor Angry speaks during the hearing.
Prince William Board of County Supervisors Chair Ann Wheeler, left, and Supervisor Andrea Bailey, right, during the hearing and discussion in preparation for a vote on the approval of the Digital Gateway projects.Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU
Supervisors Jeanine Lawson, left, and Bob Weir during the hearing. Both are Republicans who opposed the project.
Supervisor Kenny Boddye during the hearing.Wheeler pushed to keep the lengthy meeting going, moving to limit rounds of board questions and criticizing supervisors who made statements along with their questions. That often put her in conflict with the Republican supervisors, particularly Sup. Jeanine Lawson (Brentsville) and Sup. Bob Weir (Gainesville), who represents the area where the Digital Gateway will be built.
“This isn’t a bucolic data center campus. It’s not. It’s very crowded together, if you stitch the parcels together,” said Weir. He also suggested the proposed layout left few options for where power infrastructure would go, potentially endangering open space, riparian areas and wildlife corridors.
The decision is almost certain to be challenged in court, a fact Weir referenced multiple times in his comments. On Monday morning, the Coalition to Protect Prince William, a group opposed to the project, sent a letter to Wheeler and the local congressional delegation, objecting to Tuesday’s public hearing and appearing to threaten a lawsuit to nullify the board’s decision. The letter argues that the county did not adequately advertise the public hearing, as they are required to do by law, making the decisions made at the meeting legally questionable.
The group is being represented by state Sen. Chap Petersen (D-Fairfax), who put forward unsuccessful legislation last year to prevent data center development near public parks and residential homes.
In a different letter to the county attorney, lawyers for Compass Datacenters argued the delayed notification for the public hearing was the result of an error by The Washington Post, where the county placed the advertisement.
Questions about electrical transmission lines, open space
Ahead of the meeting, the county’s own planning office recommended denying the rezonings. County staff said the proposals were still not in line with the vision of the comprehensive plan. They also cited a lack of key design details, like site layouts and where electrical infrastructure would go, even after the applicants submitted multiple rounds of edits in response to staff concerns. Some of the Democrats on the board used their question and comment time during the meeting to poke holes in the staff assessment, setting up a strangely adversarial relationship between elected officials and the county’s planning professionals.
On Tuesday, representatives for Compass and QTS argued they needed the flexibility to make changes to design and building locations over the decade or more of construction. They also noted electrical infrastructure locations are the purview of Dominion Energy and NOVEC, the area’s utilities.
“I don’t know we can commit to no impact whatsoever, but we can commit to working with everyone to minimize impacts,” said a Dominion Energy representative, when asked whether possible new transmission lines would be routed through remaining natural open space on the land in question.
Planning staff also said the pressure for a quick turnaround on the project had severely stretched the office’s capacity. In some cases, key departments, including the county’s experts on the local watershed, had not been able to weigh in on the final drafts.
“I’ve seen Dunkin Donuts [locations] take longer than this,” said Chris Perez, the lead planner on two of the rezoning applications. “The time frame of one year and two months … has been challenging.”
That problem of lack of sufficient staff time to review the final agreements, Weir argued, was compounded when both companies made further changes overnight to their proposals, even as the hours of public comment progressed. He said the changes — which included new language to encourage the use of renewable energy and archaeological work to determine the extent of a nearby cemetery — were “substantive,” and should be sent back to the Planning Commission.
“I’ve been up for 29.5 hours, and you want me to read legalese and proffers and make a decision?” Weir said.
Company representatives replied the changes were meant to respond to concerns from supervisors and the public.
Community divisions
Supporters of the plan said it would bring in much-needed tax revenue to balance the fast-growing county’s residential tax burden. Prince William County received over $100 million in revenue from taxes levied on data centers last year, and county staff estimate the Digital Gateway project could add as much as $400 million to that number.
Digital Gateway opponents pointed to the possible adverse environmental impacts of turning about 2,000 acres of rural land into industrial facilities. They said the data centers will require enormous amounts of energy from a power grid already struggling to keep up with demand from data centers in Northern Virginia. And they said the project could harm the Occoquan River watershed, create noise pollution, destroy historical sites, and obstruct views from Manassas Battlefield, Conway-Robinson State Forest, and Heritage Hunt, a large retirement community nearby.
The vote came after more than 16 hours of emotional testimony from hundreds of residents. Just outside the county office where the vote took place, the United Tribes of the Shenandoah, representing indigenous groups, held a prayer vigil before the meeting began Tuesday morning.
“We do things for the next seven generations,” said Sun River, a member of the United Tribes. “We’re borrowing this land from our children and we’re doing an awful job at giving them a place to grow the food, to drink the water and to be.”
Others spoke in favor of the project, including many homeowners under contract to sell their properties to the companies. Many said the tax revenue the project would bring in would help the county raise salaries for public school teachers and first responders, and would make Prince William County more competitive with neighboring Loudoun and Fairfax counties. Others said they should be allowed to do what they wanted with their family land.
“This property has been in our family since 1876,” said Beverly Parsons, who came to the meeting with her father, Bev Davis. “I can’t tell you how surprised and disappointed we have been with the people from the PEC [Piedmont Environmental Council] and Heritage Hunt [neighborhood] coming in and having the bad faith to tell you what we can do with our family’s generational land.”
Members of the public line up to give statements in reference to the Digital Gateway project vote.
Beverly Davis looks on as his daughter, Beverly Parsons, reads a statement in support of the Digital Gateway during the public commentary part of the hearing.Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU
At the beginning of the public commentary, an opponent to the Digital Gateway project gives his statement.
During the public commentary part of the meeting, Lelia Bartruff of Gainesville speaks in favor of the Digital Gateway projectParsons called opponents to the project “arrogant,” and said she believed the rural character of the area had already been ruined by a major transmission line, which runs across her family’s property.
The argument over the Digital Gateway has consumed county politics, pitting Democratic supervisors — who mostly represent the more populous eastern part of the county — against opponents in the west, where most of the projects are slated to go. In the June primary, Wheeler was unseated by Deshundra Jefferson, who ran on a platform of curbing data center sprawl and raising county taxes on the industry.
Jefferson’s victory in the November general election means that the new board, which will be seated in January, will no longer have a majority of members supportive of data center projects. Opponents have accused Wheeler and current board members of pushing through the Digital Gateway approval process and another controversial data center project, Devlin Technology Park, before Jefferson takes her seat.
Growing industry, growing opposition
Currently, around 70% of the world’s internet runs through Northern Virginia, the result, experts say, of a combination of relatively cheap land near a major metropolitan area, existing fiber infrastructure, and state tax incentives. The industry experienced a boom during the pandemic, leading to high demand for large swaths of land in Northern Virginia to house more and more data centers.
The expansion of the industry has triggered a growing opposition movement, with the Digital Gateway fight as its main focal point. Earlier in the month, a group of about two dozen environmental and historic preservation organizations concerned about the industry’s rapid spread in Virginia announced the formation of the Data Center Reform Coalition, dedicated to curbing data center sprawl and examining the industry’s environmental impacts.
Current and future Prince William lawmakers — including Del.-elect Josh Thomas (D-Manassas), Del.-elect Ian Lovejoy (R-Bristow), and state Sen.-elect Danica Roem — joined the groups in calling for more aggressive state oversight of the industry and promising to work together in the General Assembly to deliver it.
“From the start, it has been clear that the Digital Gateway would have a negative impact on historic sites, natural resources, energy grid, and quality of life. This is not just a local land-use issue — it’s time for the state to step in and take appropriate action to preserve and protect state interests,” said Roem and Thomas in a joint statement following the vote. “In January, we will introduce legislation that places desperately-needed guardrails to regulate data center construction.”
Future data center oversight legislation potentially pits Roem, Thomas, and others against Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his veto pen. Youngkin celebrated a $35 billion commitment from Amazon to bring more data centers to the commonwealth in 2022, and data centers remain a “targeted industry” for Virginia’s economic development authority.